“Yes,” Taban said. Now it shifted, looking around at the deep chamber outside of its cell, the gunmetal veins crowding around them. “Though we think the unity rain comes in cycles, or seasons. At the beginning of a season, the event is infrequent and its effects are almost imperceptible. As time goes on, it grows in frequency and intensity, though when it activates seems to be erratic. The effect grows much stronger over time, merging things together until the event seems to exhaust itself, and the season is over for a time.” It looked back at her. “Our ship—Daley and us—arrived toward the end of the season, when the unity rain was at its strongest. That’s when it took us. It drove Daley mad, and assimilated us. Taban and HARE, HARE and Taban.”

“And us?” Park asked, her throat now dry. “My crew? When in the season did the Deucalion arrive?”

“At the beginning,” Taban answered. It scratched the back of its head with a plunger. “Though we are fast approaching the end. You’ve felt the growing effects already.”

Park closed her eyes, despite the sudden great rising storm in her heart. It all makes sense, she thought. It was why the hallways were shifting, bending and straightening impossibly; it was why she was continually getting lost. Why she and Hunter had been tossed around impossibly, without tampering or sabotage, like mice being shaken inside a cardboard box. The Fold was changing the dimensions of the ship. The unity rain was hitting us then.

“But I don’t understand,” Park said, opening her eyes again. “This unity rain—if what you’re saying is really true, I see how it could affect the physical structure of this place.” She remembered how Wick said Boone had spent some time chasing a reflection of himself in the Fold—or his actual self, reflected back on him by a curvature in spacetime. “It folds space, so obviously—the space in our ship was folded, rearranged. But what does that have to do with the nightmares? Or Keller and Holt acting strangely? How could it?”

“The unity rain merges dimensions together in strange ways,” Taban answered. “And space is not the only dimension. So when the unity rain comes, yes, it collapses and refolds it, causing spatial deformities. But consciousness is a dimension, too—a higher one than space and time, defining and shaping both. And it’s affected by the unity rain as well.”

Park had to sit there, her brain sparking like a firecracker. What? The unity rain folds consciousness together? It sounded ridiculous, some kind of mystical, spiritual nonsense dogmatized by a mad robot living out on the ice, imagining itself to be some kind of sage or guru. She still had the distinct feeling they were just barely missing each other’s meanings, like birds grazing wingtips in the clouds. Taban could not be trusted—it could not be talking sense.